![the seeker the who scull music the seeker the who scull music](https://www.thewho.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/1970-The-Seeker.jpg)
Their charges are sinners, yet not incorrigibles: they all embraced Jesus as their savior. Each of the rugged terraces is a setting for group therapy, where supernatural counsellors dispense tough love. Its terrain is forbidding-more like an alp than like a Tuscan hillside. A popular ditty captured the cynicism this practice inspired: “As soon as a coin in the coffer rings / The soul from Purgatory springs.”ĭante’s conception of Purgatory is remarkably like a wilderness boot camp. By the late Middle Ages, you could shorten your detention by years, centuries, or even millennia by paying a hefty sum to a “pardoner,” like Chaucer’s pilgrim. This invention of a liminal space for sinners who had repented but still had work to do on their souls was a great consolation to the faithful. The concept of Purgatory was relatively new when Dante was born it came into currency in the twelfth century, perhaps among French theologians. In current Catholic dogma, it is a state of being rather than an actual realm between Hell and Heaven: an inner fire in the conscience of sinners that refines their impurities. But there is no Purgatory in the Bible, or in Protestantism, or in Eastern Orthodoxy. Nearly every culture, including the most ancient, has a name for it: Diyu, Naraka, Sheol, Tartarus, Hades. His medieval theology isn’t much consolation to a modern nonbeliever, yet his art and its truths feel more necessary than ever: that greater love for others is an antidote to the world’s barbarities, that evil may be understood as a sin against love, and that a soul can’t hope to dispel its anguish without first plumbing it.Īn underworld where spirits migrate after death has always been part of humankind’s imagination. The plagues he describes are still with us: of sectarian violence, and of the greed for power that corrupts a regime. They mob him with questions: From where has he come?ĭante was a good companion for the pandemic, a dark wood from which the escape route remains uncertain. In Canto I, the pilgrim and his cicerone, Virgil, emerge from Hell and arrive at the mountain “of that second kingdom where the human spirit purges itself to become worthy of Heaven.” Dante’s body, still clad in its flesh, inspires marvel among the shades because it casts a shadow. “ Di che potenza vieni?” an old farmer had asked the godfather: “From what power dost thou come?” Purgatory, like the other two canticles of what Dante called his “sacred” epic, Inferno and Paradise, takes place during Easter week in 1300.
![the seeker the who scull music the seeker the who scull music](https://www.sinfonia.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Lee-Loughnane.jpg)
The speech of the hamlet had primed my ear for the poet’s tongue. I thought of those scenes last spring when I began reading three new translations of Purgatory, being published to coincide with the seven-hundredth anniversary of Dante’s death, at fifty-six, in September of 1321. His own experience of malevolence had taught him, as he wrote, that life “is not moral.” Yet he stood gravely at the font and vowed, “ Rinuncio.” all his seductions of sin and evil.” The godfather had been raised in a pious community, and he entered into the spirit of this one. Toward the end of the ceremony, the moment came for the sponsors to “renounce Satan and . . . Some tried to touch his hands, to see if the color would rub off there was a sense of awe among them, as if one of the Magi had come to visit. That morning, the baby’s godfather, an expatriate writer, had caused a stir in the church, since none of the villagers, most of them farmers, had ever seen a Black man in person. The blood sacrifice took place after the baptism. It came, however, with a condition: we had to watch the lamb being slaughtered.
![the seeker the who scull music the seeker the who scull music](https://i.inews.co.uk/content/uploads/2017/04/2017-04-03t123034z_625231549_rc19594c9d70_rtrmadp_3_britain-asylum-attack-640x360.jpg)
My friends were penniless bohemians, so the gift was welcome. The girl’s father politely declined, and the shepherd, to show that he had no hard feelings, offered us a lamb for our Paschal dinner. Among our party was a beauty of fifteen, an artist’s daughter, and the shepherd took such a fancy to her that he asked for her hand. He was a wild-looking man with matted hair whose harsh dialect was hard to understand. A Sardinian shepherd who tended the flocks of a local landowner came to pay his respects to the new parents. Fifty years ago, I was a guest at the baptism of a friend’s son in the ancient church of a Tuscan hamlet.